A Word, Please: Debunking em dash myths

Los Angeles Times

a day ago

For nearly 20 years, Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty has been tackling grammar myths with the grace and patience this columnist can only aspire to. On her wildly popular podcast and blog, 'Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing,' she has addressed every entrenched grammar prejudice under the sun, from the myth that says you can't end a sentence with a preposition to the mistaken belief that an adverb between 'to' and an infinitive, as in 'to boldly go,' is a grammar mistake.
And for lo these past two decades, as I've repeatedly stooped to petty grammar disputes, I've marveled at her natural magnanimity. So trust me when I tell you it takes a lot to make her say 'I'm so annoyed,' 'It's driving me crazy' and 'Please stop.'
She's talking about a language myth that won't die. Perhaps you've heard it: Dashes in a piece of writing prove, or at least make it likely, the piece was written by AI. Fogarty has heard this online a lot, mainly on social media. Based on her experience, she wasn't buying it, so she did some digging. Fogarty couldn't pinpoint exactly where the idea started, but she found the source that likely blasted this belief into the mainstream — a video for a popular podcast that talked about 'the ChatGPT hyphen,' calling it a 'longer hyphen,' and got about 2.5 million views.
Remember that Mark Twain quote 'A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes'? Well, that's a good example of how fast misinformation could spread before the internet because, apparently, that wasn't Twain. It was more likely Jonathan Swift. Whoever the source, we know that nonsense travels exponentially faster in the information age. And, as Fogarty explained, the business about dashes being a sign of AI writing is indeed nonsense.
'Em dashes' — the correct term for the punctuation marks setting off this clause — 'are not a sign of AI writing,' Fogarty said.
The very idea is kind of silly when you understand how AI writing tools learn.
'So why might AI use a lot of em dashes?' Fogarty wondered. 'And if it does, then how could seeing a lot of em dashes in someone's writing not be a sure sign they've used AI? Well, all the writing you see coming out of tools like ChatGPT are the way they are because they were trained on human writing. The only way em dashes would be in there is if people used them.'
In other words, AI's writing habits are humans' writing habits — humans like Emily Dickinson, who famously used a lot of them. That's why em dashes are useless for identifying AI-written text.
So instead of trying to learn some secret for spotting AI writing, why not invest that energy in this quick refresher on em dashes?
Em dashes, so called because they're about as wide as a lowercase letter m, connect one part of a sentence to another. They're not hyphens, which are about half that width and connect words to other words, prefixes or suffixes.
The two main jobs of an em dash are to indicate an abrupt change in sentence structure or tone and to set off parenthetical information. An abrupt change in structure is — well, it's like this. Parenthetical info — examples, related thoughts, etc. — could also go into parentheses, but dashes keep them more prominent in a sentence.
Technically, dashes are not for connecting clauses that could stand as their own sentences — this sentence should be broken into two instead of made one with a dash. But that's not so much a rule as an interpretation (mine).
Some editing styles put a space on either side of an em dash. Others attach the dash directly to the surrounding words. Either way is correct.
If you like em dashes, go ahead and use them. I, personally, am a fan. But if you're evaluating someone else's writing, don't assume em dashes mean they cheated and got AI to do their work for them. You just can't know that from their dashes.
— June Casagrande is the author of 'The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.' She can be reached at [e-mail].